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The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835–1845

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

James D. Bratt
James D. Bratt
Affiliation:
Professor of history and chair of the department of history at Calvin College.
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Extract

In March 1835 Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.” This statement has often served as an epigram for the era, the motto of that movement for revivalism and social reform that, having already swept the churches, was to so infuse the culture with its moral imperatives as to make a Civil War against slavery inevitable and the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism secure. On this reading Finney's declaration marks the midpoint in a story of triumph—triumph for revival religion, and triumph for a nation that aspired to righteousness.

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Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 52 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1998

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References

Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the Center of Theological Inquiry and the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University. I am grateful to the participants at both venues for their comments and questions; similarly to Professors Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Noll. The research was supported by generous grants from the Evangelical Scholarship Initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts and from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by in-kind assistance from CTI.

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2. This model was originally spelled out in Smith, Timothy L., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Abingdon, 1957);Google Scholar extended with more critique by Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965), pp. 3–95;Google Scholar and fully systematized in McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar

3. Finney, “Hindrances to Revivals,” Lecture XV in Lectures. The broader context of Finney's lectures is detailed, with a different interpretation, in Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996),Google Scholar and Hardman, Keith J., Charles G. Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

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5. Title of chapter 39 in Ahlstrom, Religious History. Contrary to its placement in the Civil War section of the text, the chapter largely treats materials from the 1830s and 1840s, in accord with the argument of the present article. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, most clearly spells out the cyclical interpretation summarized here.Google Scholar

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7. Marini, Stephen, Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982);CrossRefGoogle ScholarHatch, Nathan, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989);Google Scholar and McLoughlin, William G., Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), unpack these traits for successive eras in American revival history. Sociological Analysis 44 (1983) is devoted to a discussion of cyclical theories of the revival phenomenon;Google Scholar see also Barkun, Michael, “The Awakening Cycle Controversy,” Sociological Analysis 46 (1985): 425–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThomas, George M., Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation-Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth Century United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), gives a social-theoretical analysis of some of the same concerns treated here.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12. Marini, Radical Sects, Carwardine, Richard, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), and Hatch, Democratization, are the best works onthe populist side of the movement.Google ScholarKling, David W., A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792–1822 (State College, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), treats revivals among the established New England churches. Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp. 415–71, remains a fine-tuned overview of both tracks’ geographical extension.Google Scholar

13. Regarding the South, May, Henry, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 327–36; on the West, Hatch, Democratization; on Unitarianism, Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp. 388–402.Google Scholar

14. A concise overview with valuable attention to demographics is the second half of Henretta, James A. and Nobles, Gregory H., Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600–1820 (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1988);Google Scholar a more elaborate portrait is Wiebe, Robert H., The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984).Google Scholar On intellectual currents see May, Enlightenment in America, and Noll, Mark A., Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).Google ScholarSellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),Google Scholar gives a thorough economically based interpretation, while Hatch, Democratization, and Wood, Gordon S., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), spell out the religious and political-ideological dimensions.Google Scholar

15. Besides the material on Finney in McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, I have relied on Richard Carwardine, “The New Measures in the Cities,” Journal of American History 59 (1972): 327–40;Google Scholar and Johnson, Paul, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revival in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979). Hardman's biography of Finney is flush with detail, Hambrick-Stowe's adds keener insight.Google Scholar

16. McLoughlin, , Modern Revivalism, and Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, emphasize Finney's Arminian leanings.Google ScholarHambrick-Stowe, , Finney, , and Guelzo, Allen C., Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), put him more squarely in the lineage of Edwardsean Calvinism.Google ScholarGresham, John L. Jr, Charles G. Finney's Doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987), details the pneumonological, as opposed to humanagent soteriological, concerns of Finney's theology.Google Scholar

17. That Finney exaggerated his Presbyterian opposition is evident in Hambrick-Stowe, Finney; e.g., pp. 76–78.Google Scholar That McLoughlin and Smith were wrong in treating Finney as a “Jacksonian” is clear from Johnson, , Shopkeeper's Millennium, and Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 150–80.Google Scholar

18. Hardman, Charles Finney, pp. 258–76;Google ScholarBrown, Bertram Wyatt, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969), pp. 105–06, 115–22.Google Scholar

19. Hardman, , Charles Finney, pp. 335–39;Google ScholarBrown, Wyatt, Lewis Tappan, especially chapter 9.Google Scholar

20. Rosenberg, Carroll Smith, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 95–96, 186–90, 208, 216;Google ScholarBoyer, Paul, Urban Massesand Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 85–107.Google Scholar

21. Marsden, George M., The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 59–87.Google Scholar

22. Abzug, Robert H., Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 144–60, 201–48.Google Scholar Abzug notes the increasing radicalization of the reform movement chapter by chapter in his Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), without clearly attending to how and why participants like Weld became upset with or alienated from this momentum.Google Scholar

23. The centrifugal term is from Hatch, Democratization, and amply demonstrated in Henretta and Nobles, Evolution and Revolution, and Wiebe, Opening. My general argument parallels that made by Higham, John, From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–1860 (Ann Arbor: Clements Library, 1969),Google Scholar and Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), although these do not attend much to religion and date the trend in question somewhat later than I.Google Scholar

24. On the contours of the new immigration, see Taylor, Philip, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the U.S.A. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 32–42;Google Scholar on its Irish component, Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar The classic account of Protestant nativism in this era is Billington, Ray A., The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938).Google Scholar A recent study of its ultimate political manifestation is Anbinder, Tyler, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar On the Philadelphia riots, see Feldberg, Michael, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975).Google Scholar On the political ramifications of the Catholic presence, Kelley, Robert L., The Cultural Pattern in American Politics, The First Century (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 171–74.Google ScholarWuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), argues that the Protestant-Catholic divide dominated American religion through World War II.Google Scholar

25. Among others, Holt, Michael, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1981),Google Scholar and Gienapp, William E., The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), posit ethnocultural primacy in this transition.Google ScholarFoner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970),Google Scholar and McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), give the case for the slavery issue.Google ScholarKelley, Cultural Pattern, Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, Howe, Political Culture, and Brown, Bertram Wyatt, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), essay syntheses of the two forces.Google Scholar

26. Silbey, Joel, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 5–10, 26–32.Google Scholar

27. Hambrick-Stowe, , Charles Finney, pp. 211, 252; Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism, pp. 45–53.Google Scholar

28. Compare Smith's paean to this episode, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 63–94, 135–62,Google Scholar with the more critical assessment of Long, Kathryn T., The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

29. Hatch, , Democratization, pp. 64–66, 80–81, 208–09; quotation p. 81.Google Scholar See also Hughes, Richard and Allen, C. Leonard, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988);Google Scholar and, for Smith, Joseph, Marvin Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989).Google Scholar

30. Hambrick-Stowe, , Charles Finney, pp. 179–81, 217–9, 284–86, 327–30; McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, pp. 144–49.Google Scholar

31. Robert Abzug's Cosmos Crumbling breaks off at 1840 with the promise of a subsequent volume to treat the formation of Utopian communities after that date as a new phase in the reformist quest.Google Scholar The classic model was articulated in Alice Tyler, Felt, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1944).Google Scholar

32. Walters, Ronald G., American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), presents the data and some of the reconsiderations summarized here.Google ScholarMintz's, Steven synopsis, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, 1995), underscores the religious motivations of the reformers but skirts the question of complications.Google ScholarGinsberg, Lori D., Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), offers an evaluation of the course of women evangelicals compatible with the argument being offered here.Google Scholar

33. Marsden, New School Presbyterian Experience; Smith, Elwyn A., “The Forming of a Modern American Denomination,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 31 (1962): 74–99;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPearson, Samuel C. Jr, “From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the Nineteenth Century,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 38 (1969): 67–87;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hughes and Leonard, Illusions of Innocence, pp. 170–87; Lambert, Byron C., The Rise of the Antimission Baptists: Sources and Leaders, 1800–1840 (New York: Arno Press, 1980).Google Scholar

34. Carwardine, Richard, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993),CrossRefGoogle Scholar notes this explicitly (p. 273) as of 1854, but the book offers much evidence of such well before that date. McKivigan, John R., The War on Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984);Google ScholarSchneider, A. Gregory, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).Google Scholar In Democratization Nathan Hatch interprets the Methodist turn toward respectability as a declension from their early republican virtue; I see it as part of an attempt to overcome the debilities in their traditional program and as an adaptation to a new national environment.

35. Goen, C. C., Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985);Google ScholarSnay, Mitchell, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The bourgeoisification of revivalism is clearly evident from Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, and Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

36. Nord, David, “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media, 1805–1835,” Journalism Monographs 88 (1984): 1–31;Google Scholar and Zboray, Ronald J., A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), are recent analyses.Google ScholarNye, Russell B., The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970);Google Scholar and Bode, Carl, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), have interesting data and detail.Google Scholar

37. Bushnell and Nevin are treated below. Emerson's new career outside the Unitarian ministry was launched with the publication of Nature in 1836, a treatise that incorporated (secondhand) German Idealist approaches but that also echoed what I argue were the dying chords of unlimited possibility. By 1844, in “Experience,” and 1851, in “Fate,” Emerson was quite clearly articulating the dependence of the “Self” on “Nature”and the latter's course of development. That this development could be quite ruthless he had learned from the death of his son Waldo in 1841. Of more immediate import for traditional theological matters was Theodore Parker's translation in 1836 of David Strauss's Leben Jesu and his own “Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841).Google Scholar

38. Cashdollar, Charles D., The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 93–100.Google ScholarHanley, Mark Y., Beyond a Christian Commonwealth: The Protestant Quarrel with the American Republic, 1830–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994),Google Scholar and Conser, Walter H. Jr, God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), treat some of the anxieties generated by this twofold radical uprising.Google ScholarHanley, , in “The New Infidelity: Northern Protestant Clergymen and the Critique of Progress, 1840–855,” Religion and American Culture 1 (Summer 1991): 215–16, notes that the flourishing lyceum circuit after 1840 as well as the explosive growth in book publishing created alternative venues to the orthodox pulpit for theological/philosophical opinion formation.Google Scholar

39. On Princeton, see Sandeen, Ernest R., The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);Google Scholar and Stewart, Jack W., “The Tethered Theology: Biblical Criticism, Common Sense Philosophy, and the Princeton Theologians, 1812–1860” (Ph.D. diss, University of Michigan, 1990).Google ScholarI understand Edwardseanism more genetically in the mode of Sydney Ahlstrom, Religious History, pp. 403–14, to include the New Haven theology, while Guelzo, Edwards on the Will, pointedly contrasts the two. On eitherunderstanding the two schools were fixed on the same agenda, the larger point here.Google Scholar

40. I have relied on Doan, Ruth Alden, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987);Google ScholarRowe, David, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800–1850 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985);Google Scholar and Numbers, Ronald L. and Butler, Jonathan M., eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

41. The data in this paragraph is from Numbers, Ronald L., Prophetess of Health: Ellen C. White and the Origins of Seventh-Day Adventism, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992),Google Scholar especially chapter 1. That the notion ofsanctuary has been a potent ideal among White's spiritual descendants is evident from Bull, Malcolm and Lockhart, Keith, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).Google Scholar

42. This analysis has been shaped by Hill, Quest; Pollock, Gordon D., In Search of Security: The Mormons and the Kingdom of God on Earth (New York: Garland, 1989);Google ScholarWinn, Kenneth H., Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Hatch, Democratization, pp. 113–22.Google Scholar

43. On sacraments, Hill, Quest, pp. 113–14. On the crucial events of 1837–38, Hill, Quest, pp. 55–98, and Winn, Exiles, pp. 106–51. On the climax of 1844, Winn, Exiles, pp. 208–38.Google Scholar

44. Upjohn, Everard M., Richard Upjohn: Architect and Churchman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). On hiscommissions, p. 101; on the theological vision behind his architecture, pp. 68–100; on its extension into housing styles, pp. 90–3, 117–24.Google Scholar For the more general movement, see Stanton, Phoebe B., The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

45. Hedrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 143–57, 272–87;Google Scholar and Foster, Charles H., The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), pp. 91–98, 134–14, 163–72.Google Scholar

46. Cave, Alfred, An American Conservative in the Age of Jackson (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1969), emphasizes Colton's economic thought.Google Scholar For the religious dimension, see Cave, , “Calvin Colton: An AntebellumDisaffection with the Presbyterian Church,” Journal of Presbyterian History 50 (Spring 1972): 39–53;Google Scholar and Woolverton, John, “Whither Episcopalianism? A Century of Apologetic Interpretations of the Episcopal Church, 1835–1964,” Anglican Theological Review, supp. ser., no. 1 (07 1973): 142–45. Woolverton notes that Colton pioneered a new, positive apologetic stressing the firmness of the church's “fundamental constitution.”Google Scholar

47. Wentz, Richard E., John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is a concise study in culture and theology;Google ScholarNichols, James H., Romanticism in American Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), supplies greater detail.Google Scholar Nevin's place in international context is well presented in Conser, Walter H. Jr, Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England, and America (Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 273–97.Google Scholar Recent interpretations and ample bibliography are contained in Hamstra, Sam Jr, and Griffioen, Arie, eds., Reformed Confessionalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Essays on the Thought of John Williamson Nevin (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995).Google Scholar

48. Owen, Ralph Dornfeld, “The Old Lutherans Come,” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 20 (04 1947): 3–56;Google Scholar statistic from p. 3. For overviews of Missouri Synod history, see Baepler, Walter A., A Century of Grace: A History of the Missouri Synod, 1847–1947 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1947);Google Scholar and Wentz, Abdel Ross, A BasicHistory of Lutheranism in America (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1955), pp. 114–36.Google Scholar On Walther in particular, see Spitz, Lewis W., The Life of Dr. C. F. W. Walther (St. Louis: Concordia, 1961).Google Scholar The man and the movement are set in broader context in Tappert, Theodore G., ed., Lutheran Confessional Theology in America, 1840–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 6–16, 23–37; and in Conser, Church and Confession, pp. 13–96,257–63.Google Scholar

49. The most convenient introduction to Krauth is Ahlstrom, Sydney E., ed., Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 52–57, 427–60.Google ScholarSee further Tappert, , Lutheran Confessional Theology, and Conser, Church and Confession, pp. 257–73.Google Scholar

50. On the dynamics of New England identity after the Great Awakening, see Hatch, Nathan, “The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31 (1974): 407–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Bushnell's life, see Edwards, Robert L., Of Singular Genius, Of Singular Grace: A Biography of Horace Bushnell (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1992).Google Scholar For his social and political thought, see Barnes, Howard A., Horace Bushnell and the Virtuous Republic (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991),Google Scholar and Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Social Science of Horace Bushnell,” Journal of American History 70 (09 1983): 305–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On his views of religious language, see Duke, James O., Horace Bushnell: On the Vitality of Biblical Language (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984).Google Scholar Conrad Cherry pulls these themes together in “The Structure of Organic Thinking: Horace Bushnell's Approach to Language, Nature, and Nation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (03 1972): 3–20.Google Scholar

51. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973); on religion inher later life, pp. 203, 260–63.Google Scholar The common move from revivalism to domesticity exemplified by Beecher, and Bushnell, is explored in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977);Google ScholarRyan, Cradle of the Middle Class; and McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840–1900 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar That these years represented a new departure in emphasis on the home as sanctuary is evident from Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study in Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

52. Bushnell, preached “The Northern Iron” (Hartford: E. Hunt, 1854) on the 14 April 1854 fast day occasioned by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.Google Scholar The ancestry of Grant and Sherman is noted in his address honoring Yale alumni who served in the Civil War, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” conveniently available in McLoughlin, William G., ed., American Evangelicals, 1800–1900: An Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 141–57; see especially pp.143–44.Google Scholar

53. On Finney's post-1835 development I have relied on Hambrick-Stowe, Finney, pp. 165–298; for theological interpretations, compare Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, pp. 103–13;Google ScholarDayton, Donald W., Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987), pp. 63–84; and Gresham, Finney's Doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.Google Scholar

54. Very sympathetic biographical studies are Raser, Harold E., Phoebe Palmer: Her Life and Thought (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen, 1987);Google Scholar and White, Charles E., The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as Theologian, Revivalist, Feminist, and Humanitarian (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986).Google Scholar But see also Hovet, Theodore, “Phoebe Palmer's ‘Altar Phraseology’ and the Spiritual Dimension of Women's Sphere,” Journal of Religion 63 (1983):264–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. Niebuhr, H. Richard, Pauck, Wilhelm, and Miller, Francis P., The Church Against the World (Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1935).Google Scholar